Spoiler alert: this breakdown divulges key information about the plot of the film. For screenwriters, Interstellar is a study in convergence. In my opinion, setting up a story vortex is the single most important technique in popular screenwriting today (found in the Anatomy of Story M

Spoiler alert: this breakdown divulges information about the plot of the film. Most critics say that Dawn of the Planet of the Apes is a better film than Rise of the Planet of the Apes (hereafter known as Dawn and Rise). I don’t agree. But what I find most interesting is how the story

Inception takes off like a rocket and then slowly runs out of fuel. I loved the mind teaser of a plot, but found the longer the movie went on the less I cared. How a film can generate two such different responses has to do with the most important relationship in a story, the one betwe

Spoiler alert: this structure breakdown contains information about the plot.  District 9 is a perfect example of the primary story strategy on which the worldwide entertainment business is based: use a popular genre as a vehicle to carry a larger theme.  A genre is a story model, but

Renewing an old series is one of the most difficult challenges for a screenwriter. The audience is familiar with all of the previous stories and the series’ complete iconography. So the bar is very high. Plus, the reason you are renewing series is because the mythology has been told t

As the most creative, literally, of all genres, science fiction places a tremendous burden on the writer. You have to create the world, in detail. Children of Men gets some of this right. But there’s a lot missing, too.  The first rule of science fiction is to remember that you&

One of the main screenwriting strategies since Star Wars is to grab from a number of story forms and weave them together. Unfortunately this technique is much harder than it looks.  AI shows the episodic and bloated script that results when you don’t know how to connect all the